The Curious Incident of the Dad at Playtime
A 21st century parable on gratitude, and a life well lived.
Congratulations to each and every one of you who made it through the holidays with mostly positive memories and minimal emotional scarring. And huge commiserations to the parents of toddlers who accepted delivery of an IKEA DUKTIG kiddie kitchen from Santa—bravo, you now have two kitchens to clean every day.
It’s normally around December 29th when my brain starts putting what must be the coldest line in the Christmas canon on repeat: “And mum and dad can hardly wait for school to start again.” I started writing this essay on Thursday, 8th January, the first day my kids were back in school. The night before, the feeling of butterflies in my belly felt familiar to how I felt on Christmas Eve decades earlier. Friends in the UK and Amsterdam were patiently waiting for this day to arrive, only to be hit with the rare first day back is a snow day: schools closed, children stubbornly stuck at home; unexpected afternoons hurtling down hills on makeshift sledges, flashes of colour flying through the white, an L.S. Lowry painting brought to life.
It’s not that Christmas is the problem. It’s the fact that it keeps going. The closing of the calendar is an intense period when we are expected—politely, relentlessly—to put in a double-duty parenting shift. It takes its toll; some make it to the other side in better shape than others. A cautionary Christmas tale: on a dark and snowy School Eve, the day before children across the United States were due to return to school, we see a father sitting with his smartphone in hand. This man, feeling destroyed, dejected and despondent—as so many of us did on that final day—decides not to ponder on the best way to navigate it next year, or to send a message to a group of small friends and say “we’re almost there,” or to take it as a chance to practice gratitude and look back on sweet memories and milestones during those cold days and nights. Instead, this man decides to tweet to the world, asking, “Am I a monster?” because “[when] I have to watch [my kids] for more than about 10 minutes, my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working, or accomplishing something.”
Fallen at the final hurdle, a missed tap-in from five yards, a goal-line fumble—whatever sport metaphor you want to reach for will work. The kids’ backpacks are packed, their uniforms laid out—you’re so close, and then you become today’s main character. As you’d expect, the pile-on was instantaneous. Folks told him, “Your wife and children deserve better,” “You blame society while your four-year-old goes unloved,” or “Evolution was supposed to get rid of losers like you.” One account posted a quote from a 19th-century Portuguese poet, informing him, “There’s something vile in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.” Others dug up red flags from his timeline. And the obligatory memes came thick and fast. A reminder, yet again, to never tweet.
To answer his question: Is he a monster? For what it’s worth, I don’t think so. He was being honest and genuinely curious about why he didn’t feel the way he’d witnessed other dads did about their kids. However, his articulation—and the telltale sign that his children are an impediment to “accomplishing something”—feels like a clear indication that his values and priorities are misaligned with those of today’s father.
It was easier to be a dad back then: required by your family and society-at-large to work first and parent second (or, given his lengthy reply, much lower in the list of priorities). But those dads who continue to play by the old rules end up hating the modern game. When we view time with our children and their “insatiable desire to play” (his words, again) as a messy distraction that pulls us away from achieving other, seemingly more important goals, you will always see your kids as a side quest rather than a key thrust of the main narrative. It’s not that your life story needs to be completely two-dimensional—I’m thinking of a branching CD Projekt RED game here, rather than the more singular, revenge-focused Ghost of Yotei—but we should work to ensure the strands of our life carry equal weight, even if they can’t get equal airtime.
Popular opinion might differ, but I do believe there are still places to be vulnerable online. I hope this newsletter and the comments are among them. And I know our community Dadscord is a place to come together with other dads asking big, hairy, existential questions, to share their greatest dreams and darkest fears. These places exist. But the website formerly known as Twitter, in the year two thousand and twenty-six, is certainly not one of them.
Time Carries On, Never-Ending
Christmas is a time—as William DeVaughn once smoothly sang, and Massive Attack echoed—to be thankful for what you got. This year, two stone-cold Christmas classics confirmed it. I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol with my son for the first time, and marvelled as it blew his mind just as it had my own decades earlier. Time hasn’t hurt this movie, especially in a world where AI slop feels to be pouring in from every open crevice: there was a sweet relief to be in the hands of actual craftspeople—puppeteers, singers, set builders—doing the real thing.
Later, without the kids, I watched It’s A Wonderful Life (itself another spin on Dickens’ foundational festive text). My mum always told me this was her favourite Christmas movie, but as a kid, it felt like a three-hour black-and-white endurance test. But as an adult, it feels like a corrective lens. George Bailey can’t see the shape of his life while he’s living it. The movie’s message is as powerful today as it ever was: if you have everything you once wanted, and it still feels like you’re failing, maybe the scoreboard you’re using is the wrong one.
If you’ve had a relatively successful career, you might have seen your salary jump to a level as a 40-year-old that would have left the 20-year-old-you dumbstruck. You may have the life you once wanted—in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife—but the modern world will do everything in its power to keep you on the hedonic treadmill. Thanks to hopefully accurate statistics—based on all those cookies your phone keeps eating and regurgitating to my dashboard—I can assume two-thirds of you are reading this on a smartphone. I like to think the screen time you choose to spend here, and not doomscrolling through social media feeds designed to give you FOMO, or broadcasting to the world how much you hate playing with your kids, feels well spent.
The device in your hand is more than a machine for inhaling the world and exhaling yourself into it. If you’re a new-ish dad, here’s something I’ve learned: your phone is a piece of witchcraft, a spell of unfathomable power. It is a time machine. But there’s just one catch. You must abandon your twee Marty McFly dreams—and that interminable wait for a Marvel hoverboard that should have arrived 3,740 days ago—because this device can only go backwards. It provides, just like Don Draper’s infamous Kodak pitch, “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone … that takes us to a place that we ache to go again … to a place where we know we were loved.”
My kids are now back at school. I can finally think again—sufficient windows of time when their attention is focused elsewhere, and I can write, think and do once more. They’ve brought home their first projects for 2026: my son, at six, almost managed to get the class to agree on “chocolate” as their focus, but was pipped at the post by a very strong “Egypt” voting block. He came home devastated, until I started to share stories I knew about the ancient Egyptians, their pyramids, hieroglyphics and their love of cats. My daughter came back and informed me that her first project is on the reproductive system, and her homework is to prepare a presentation about her birth. My wife and I rattled through what we could offer: our memories of the day, a birthing plan that sits in Google Docs with an inception date of 2014. But the killer blow came when I opened Google Photos, typed in the month of her birth, handed it over to her, and we all piled into the digital DeLorean for a trip back in time: to the days before, during, and after she was born.
Her project, combined with limitless cloud storage (available for a small monthly fee), offered me the chance to talk to her about the day I became a father. As we scrolled through the first minutes, hours and days of her life—the midwife that helped deliver her, visits from friends and family, a kitchen renovation nowhere near completed, the first time my mother held her—I was filled with an overwhelming sense of bliss. In a moment like this, the idea that my daughter has robbed me of a life of productivity, success and achievement is the furthest thing from my mind.
Has fatherhood made my life easier? Absolutely not. But has it introduced me to a breadth and depth in worldview and emotional capacity that would have been nigh-on impossible to achieve otherwise? Based on a tweet that kicked all of this off—a feeling I suspect this man didn’t experience solely, even if he was reckless enough to share it online—this isn’t the case for every dad.
But I can safely state that it is 100% true for me.
Do I Really Look Like A Guy With A Plan?
A few days ago, I celebrated my 43rd rotation around the sun. My body aches. The lines on my forehead signal to anyone with a passing interest that I’m well into my fifth decade on this earth. (At a Christmas party, an eight-year-old son of a friend asked me about the “cool scar” on my forehead and after a beat, I realised he was talking about one of the two diagonal frown lines that seem to have taken root on my forehead over the last few years.)
The goal this year is clear. The book is done. This year won’t be easy, but I hope I can spend it reaping what I spent last year sowing. Instead of entering the year with goals, I’m trying to come into it thinking about mindset. Last year, between writing a book and managing a nightmare client, there were times I can clearly point to when I dropped the ball as a dad. Many times, I lost my shit with my kids in order to be left alone; ironically, to focus on writing a book about being a better dad, whilst my kids were on the other side of the door, feeling like I wasn’t doing a great job. For 2026, I’m abandoning former annual traditions of end-of-year wrap-ups, goal-setting, or setting an intention for the year—resisting the very male urge to view the changing of the year with the same energy that drove the performative perf cycles in my former life. The immovable date of May 12th approaches. Soon, you will be able to hold in your hands (or listen with your ears) to the 80,000 words that almost destroyed me last year. I can hardly wait.
Whilst I’m taking a swerve around the performance review mentality of January, there’s one thing that is harder to shake: the feeling that once again, in what will be my eighth year working for myself outside of the security of a a regular monthly paycheck, I am embarking on Operation Pull Rabbit Out of Hat—attempting to provide for my family via the means of strangers on the internet. So, if you enjoy this newsletter, please consider investing in the following products and services:
Pre-order the book. I’m still sitting on some pre-order badges, so if you’re planning on buying the book and would like a gorgeous heart-shaped badge, now’s your time. Order on Amazon, or support your local bookseller on Bookshop.org, fill out this form, and I’ll send your badge near the launch date.
One-to-one coaching. If you’ve decided 2026 is the year that you want to make big changes in your life—at home, at work, anywhere and everywhere in between—or to find more joy and fulfilment in the life you have, this could be the year we work together. Find out more here.
REBOOT, a group coaching program for dads. This March, we’ll be kicking off the next cohort of REBOOT. Last year, six dads came together for six months to radically rethink the most important relationships in their lives: with their work, friends, families, and themselves. Applications are now open for the second cohort. Here’s what Sam, a dad from the first group, said about the experience:
I was hesitant to join REBOOT because I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to get out of it. I felt like I needed to go into it with defined goals and an expectation for what I would achieve by the end. I’m glad I didn’t wait. At the beginning of REBOOT, we set goals for the program and over the next 6 months, I worked one-on-one with Kevin—and with the other dads—digging into the “why” behind each of my goals. Through that journey, I ended up somewhere I hadn’t expected, with more clarity in how I define a successful life and where to seek fulfilment. Kevin’s thoughtful, probing questions during our weekly meetings forced me to think more deeply about work, life, and family, and how to seek balance across each.
There are also other ways you can help keep the lights on in my house and baked beans on my childrens’ toast:
Sponsor the podcast: Next month, The New Fatherhood podcast returns. This time around, I’m delighted to be working with Elizabeth Van Brocklin, an Emmy-nominated journalist and award-winning long-form audio producer, and we can’t wait to unwrap what we’ve been working on. A niche ask, but surely relevant to some of you: founders, PR agencies or marketing teams interested in the very first advertising placements TNF has offered. Interested? Read our partnership pack here.
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Get involved in a dad community. If one thing on your 2026 to-do list is getting more dads in your life, I can suggest two options. The first is free: join a local Dadurdays community. I can’t guarantee you’ll be in one of the 27 locations covered, but if you live in a fairly big US city, then there’s a decent chance. Secondly, consider becoming a paid subscriber and hanging out in the Dadscord. Example chats this week have included heady highs as which tea bag is best (insider trading-level knowledge for US dads), how to keep yourself accountable for health and fitness goals, and the trials of buying a better vacuum (that one was from #dull-club, fast becoming my favourite channel). Join the Dadscord today.
Multi-pronged sales pitch over. Thanks for sticking through it.
Good Dadvice
Say Hello
That was a rather long one. Kicking off the writing cobwebs. How was it for you?
Thank you Kevin for writing something that refuses both pile-on culture and moral escape hatches. This felt honest without being indulgent, and reflective without being preachy. What resonated deeply is your framing of phones as time machines that only go backward. That metaphor captures something profound about memory, regret, and attention.
One thought your essay sparked is that play isn’t the opposite of productivity. It’s a different metric of contribution. Children don’t need us to produce outcomes; they need us to co-create moments. That may be one of the few spaces left where worth isn’t measured, but felt.
Loved this!! Happy belated bday:) and also! I too re-watched Muppets Christmas Carol this year and was soooo delighted by how well its magic holds up! Hope your holidays were fabulous <3